


Feeling Better

by miss_pryss



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:33:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_pryss/pseuds/miss_pryss
Summary: The kitchen isn’t a separate room so much as a corner of the living room where the wood floor turns into ceramic tile. There’s a note on the fridge, scrawled in emphatic capital letters: EAT SOMETHING. Matt obediently peers inside and finds it better stocked than he expected. Milk and butter, eggs, apples, about six different kinds of mustard, a few tupperware containers with what looks like leftover spaghetti and meatballs, and, front and center, a plastic-wrapped sandwich with a post-it note that says, in the same scrawled hand: START HERE.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mokuyoubi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mokuyoubi/gifts).



Later, Matt won’t be able to remember being discharged from the hospital in DC; won’t remember how he got back to his apartment building in New Jersey. What’s left of his apartment building. The artist formerly known as his apartment building. His apartment building is pining for the fjords: it is an ex apartment building.

Matt stands numbly in front of the flimsy plywood wall that’s been erected around the now-vacant remains of the building. He can just make out the flame-scarred hole where his kitchen window used to be. 

CONDEMNED, the sign says.

THIS STRUCTURE HAS BEEN FOUND TO BE HAZARDOUS TO LIFE, it says.

No shit, Matt thinks.

He rummages in his jacket pocket, looking for his phone, and finds a crumpled piece of paper. Smoothing it out, he sees that it has a phone number with a 917 area code scribbled on it and the letters “JM”.

Matt remembers: John McClane’s big, hard hand closing his fist gently around the piece of paper. He remembers: John’s voice, surprisingly soft. “Anything, okay? You call. Got it?” And Matt had said, “Got it,” nodding, not looking up. He thinks they’d been in the ambulance at that point. He isn’t sure. He was in the hospital for a long time, he thinks, staring sleeplessly at a series of stained ceilings. A lot of the details of the immediate aftermath have gotten kind of hazy. 

Matt’s sky high on hydromorphone from the hospital pharmacy, but his knee is still screaming. He’s been standing in front of his building for a while now. How long? He finds his phone in his other pocket. It’s 10:41pm. That doesn’t help much; he has no idea what time he got here. 

He dials the number, and kind of blanks out again while it’s ringing. John’s voice on the line is sharp, tired. “ _What_.” It feels like Matt has to come back from a very far away place to say, “John. Hi.”

“Who is this?”

“Sorry, yeah, it’s me.”

John laughs. “Buddy, you’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

Despite the pain, despite the drugs, despite the clear, cold sky pressing down from above and the hard, heavy planet pressing up from below, Matt smiles. “Oops,” he says. “Sorry, I’m sort of a cosmic sandwich right now.”

“You sure are,” John says, his voice still smiling. Matt’s still smiling, too. “It’s Matt,” he says. “From, you know. From the very bad stuff that happened.” 

“Well, hi, Matt,” John says, but Matt’s kind of gone away again, and it takes him a little while to say “Hi” back.

“Matt, you okay?” John asks.

“No,” Matt says, because it’s true. 

“Okay,” John says. “Can you give me some details?”

“I’m in New Jersey,” Matt says. That part is easy. “But I can’t go home because it’s—“ he squints at the sign, “—hazardous to life.”

“Okay,” John says. “What else?”

“My brain is. Not good,” Matt adds. “I had a lot of trouble sleeping in the hospital. Um, like, at all. Also, drugs.”

“Do you have any family in the area?” John asks. “Or close friends?”

“No.” Matt isn’t worried, though. John will help him figure this out. “What should I do?”

On the other end of the line, John sighs. “Okay,” he says. “I want you to look around you. Is there a restaurant or a store that’s still open right now?”

Matt peers down the block to the bodega. The door is open and light is spilling out. The little gray bodega cat is sitting in her usual spot by the door. 

“Bodega,” Matt reports back to John. 

“Can you walk there?” John asks. Matt thinks about it. He has the phone in one hand and his crutches jammed up under his armpits.

“I think I need both of my hands to do the crutches,” he tells John. 

“Okay,” John says. “Listen carefully. Don’t hang up. Just put the phone in your pocket while you go to the bodega. When you get there, give the phone to the guy behind the counter, okay?”

Matt rolls his eyes. “I’m not _that_ high,” he says. “I can talk to you for myself just fine.”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” John says. “Just do it.”

So Matt slips the phone into his pocket and hobbles down the block. He considers trying to pet the little gray cat on his way in but he hasn’t really figured out how to bend over with the crutches. 

The guy behind the counter is watching a Korean soap opera and chewing on a cuticle. Matt fishes his phone out of his pocket and slides it across the counter. The bodega guy looks at it blankly and then looks at Matt.

“Um,” Matt says. This is harder to explain than he expected. “It’s for you.”

“Pretty sure it’s not,” the guy says, and gently pushes the phone back towards Matt. “No,” Matt says, “I, see,” and stalls out again. The guy crooks an eyebrow. “Can you just talk to him, please?” Matt manages, and slides the phone back across the counter. He can feel his eyes getting teary. This is all so _complicated_ and he just wants to lie _down_. 

The guy shrugs and picks up the phone. “Hello?” he says tentatively. “Yeah?” He listens for a little while, and then nods. “Okay,” he says. “But—“ and then he’s listening again. 

The bodega guy talks to John for a while. Maybe. Matt isn’t sure because he zones out again, which is nice. Then the bodega guy is leading him into a tiny, cramped room in the back and helping him sit down on a plastic crate. 

“Your friend is coming,” the guy says. “I gotta go back out front. Don’t touch anything.” He hands Matt a bottle of fizzy water. “He said you should drink this.” 

Matt concentrates on drinking the seltzer, one sip at a time. After a while he’s done with that, and he moves on to petting the little gray cat, who has wandered into the back room for a snack. She finishes her kibble and hops up on his lap. It’s nice. His vision keeps blurring, but it’s nice to have something to focus on so he doesn’t have to think about his knee too much. John is coming. That’s a nice thing to focus on too.

“John is really great,” Matt tells the little gray cat, who twists an ear at him but otherwise doesn’t react. “I mean, he’s sort of a dick. But he’s great too. He’s more great than he is a dick. I think. I don’t actually know him that well, I guess. But it feels like I do? It feels like I’ve known him for a long time. Maybe he's only a dick when people are trying to kill him. I mean, like, who could blame him, right?”

The cat shuts her eyes. Matt keeps scratching her chin. “You’re a good listener,” he tells her. 

Matt’s knee has gone from horrible to nearly unbearable by the time John arrives. John: tall and broad and cranky-looking. Matt’s never been so happy to see anyone in his entire life, except, he supposes, John, the last time John came to rescue him. 

“Hey,” Matt says through the big goofy grin that’s plastered itself all over his face. John strides into the tiny back room and heaves him up to stand. “Hey,” John says back, fishing Matt’s crutches out from the corner they were propped in and helping him wrap his arms around them. It’s all very businesslike. But Matt is not feeling very businesslike right now. 

“Hey,” Matt says again, tipping forward into John, his face pressing against the soft, warm fabric of John’s t-shirt. John’s chest is firm and comforting. Warm. John stiffens. Matt sort of nuzzles his face into him. “Hey, what the fuck,” John says. 

“I need a hug,” Matt explains, muffled. Sometimes you have to state the obvious, especially for people who aren’t good at feelings. He thinks maybe John isn’t great at feelings. 

“Are you shitting me with this?” John says, but his voice is amused. 

“I am not shitting you with this,” Matt says. “I really need a hug.” He stays there, leaning into John, breathing him in, until John’s arms come up for the world’s awkwardest hug. It’s wonderful. This close, Matt can tell that the bandage John is wearing over his shoulder wound smells like blood and disinfectant, and somehow that only comforts Matt _more_.

“Okay, my friend,” John says after a while. “Let’s get you out of here.” 

“I wanna go to your house,” Matt says, too worn out from pain and opiates to be even a little bit smooth about it. 

“Yeah, okay,” John sighs. “You can come to my house. Let’s just go, okay?” 

They limp out of the bodega, and John passes a wad of bills to the bodega guy. “Thanks,” John says, and the guy grunts, not looking up from his TV screen, where two impossibly beautiful middle-aged Korean women are staring icily at each other. “I hope they mend fences,” Matt tells the bodega guy, who does look up at that and says: “Unlikely.” 

If Matt had given any thought to what kind of car John McClane would drive, he’d probably have guessed some lovingly restored 1970s muscle car—a little on-the-nose, yes, but it would have been so in character. But instead, a slightly battered mid-oughts Toyota Camry is waiting out front. 

“My mom has this car,” Matt says, as he creaks into the passenger seat. 

“Then I’m sure she enjoys the excellent mileage and the reliability of Japanese engineering,” John says mildly. 

“She does,” Matt says. He’s asleep before the engine turns on. 

 

* * *

 

At John’s Brooklyn apartment Matt sleeps for 20 hours, gets up to piss for what feels like another hour, and then goes back to bed. He wakes up to the late afternoon sun slanting through the window. He’s in John McClane’s bed. His knee hurts but it’s bearable. His head is clear for the first time in…weeks? And he has a hard-on.

For a few minutes, Matt lies there, enjoying the smell of John on the sheets and idly considering jacking off. But the logistical difficulties (avoiding discovery; managing cleanup) defeat him and instead he staggers into John’s bathroom for a shower. It’s an awkward business—at some point John changed the bandage on his knee and he doesn’t want to get it wet, so he showers with his leg sticking out of the tub, and clings for dear life to the safety bar mounted on the shower wall. Matt always figured those things were for old people, but he figures that a guy who routinely saves the world in the most self-injurious way possible probably spends a lot of time recuperating from being mangled, and would want some safety features in his bathroom. 

Mostly clean and only a little self-conscious in a pair of John’s sweat pants and a soft, worn long-sleeved T-shirt, Matt crutches his way into the living room. He only realizes he was actually hoping to find John there—and not dreading the inevitable awkwardness of the meeting—when he’s disappointed to find the living room empty. 

The kitchen isn’t a separate room so much as a corner of the living room where the wood floor turns into ceramic tile. There’s a note on the fridge, scrawled in emphatic capital letters: EAT SOMETHING. Matt obediently peers inside and finds it better stocked than he expected. Milk and butter, eggs, apples, about six different kinds of mustard, a few tupperware containers with what looks like leftover spaghetti and meatballs, and, front and center, a plastic-wrapped sandwich with a post-it note that says, in the same scrawled hand: START HERE.

He does. Matt eats the sandwich (ham and cheese, home-made) first. Then he eats one of the containers of spaghetti. Then he takes half a pain pill and lies down on John’s scratchy, overstuffed, sagging couch. There’s a fluffy throw blanket and Matt pulls it up over himself. He lies there with his eyes closed, listening to traffic trundle by outside, and waits for the pill to kick in.

 

* * *

 

 

When he wakes up it’s dark and John’s front door is opening, harsh fluorescent light from the hallway slanting in. John hits the light switch in the living room and Matt sits up, blinking. 

“Hi,” he says, and John smiles, a gorgeous, crooked grin that kind of lights him up from the inside. Matt’s heart twists a little. It isn’t fair that someone so scary can be so adorable. 

John comes into the living room carrying a bag of takeout from a Chinese restaurant. “Noodles,” he says, and then, “sit,” when Matt starts trying to stand up to help. Matt sits, and watches John move around the kitchen, unpacking the takeout. He plops down next to Matt on the couch and hands him a plate loaded with warm, fragrant noodles flecked with bits of hot pepper.

They eat in silence, but it’s nice. Matt isn’t sure what he’d say, anyway, and dreads having to answer even the most basic questions: what are you going to do now. Where are you going to live. Why did you call me. How long do you need to stay here. Why are you looking at me like that. 

It’s just: it’s just so _disorienting_ , seeing the guy eating lo mein with his sleeves rolled up, on a goddamn _couch._ His hands are broad and scarred—blunt instruments—but they handle the bamboo chopsticks deftly, the tendons in his wrists and forearms flexing under the skin as the muscles shift. Matt blinks.

“What day is it?” he asks abruptly. He’s been staring, and that’s not great. Better risk an awkward conversation than keep mooning at John like this. 

“Thursday,” John says. Matt struggles to do the math in his head, but he honestly isn’t sure when he got discharged. He was pretty out of it.

“Two days,” John fills in. “You were asleep for most of two days.”

“I guess I was tired,” Matt says lamely. Then, belatedly, it occurs to him to wonder: “Where did you sleep?” Matt had poked around the apartment a little and hadn’t found a second bedroom—just a broom closet with a small arsenal in it. 

“Here,” John says, that funny little smile quirking across his face again. He pats the couch cushion. 

“Oh geez,” Matt says, dismayed. “I’m sorry, dude, I didn’t mean to put you out of your own bed. And your shoulder is probably still pretty fucked up.”

John shrugs. “It’s fine,” he says, and Matt isn’t sure if he’s talking about the couch or his shoulder. 

And _then_ he says: “It’s nice, having the company. Having someone to take care of. Sometimes it seems like all I do is fuck shit up. Even when I’m doing it on purpose, for a good reason. So you should stick around as long as you need to.”

Matt stares at him and then blurts out, “Wow, you’re _way_ better at feelings than I expected you to be.” 

John barks a laugh and Matt can feel his face heating up. He’s probably beet red, but holy shit, what a stupid fucking thing to say.

“Turns out,” John says, “that therapy is pretty good for that.” 

“You have a _therapist_?” Matt asks, hoping the incredulity in his voice isn’t out-and-out insulting. 

“Helps with the nightmares,” John says. “And it’s better than self-medication.”

Matt’s head is spinning. 

“Anyway,” John says, “stick around as long as you need to. I don’t mind the company. Just don’t touch my guns.”

 

* * *

 

They fall into a routine over the next week: John leaves for work early and gets back pretty promptly around 5:30, usually with some kind of takeout, which they eat in companionable silence on the couch. Matt keeps offering to pay, and John keeps brushing him off. Finally, after a few days of daytime television and long naps, Matt’s bored enough and peppy enough to rifle through the fridge and pull out the ingredients for a reasonable dinner. He texts John not to bother with takeout and gets to work.

By the time John gets home, Matt’s got the kitchen mostly clean again and is back on the couch with his knee elevated. There’s a lasagna baking in the oven and broccoli steaming on the stove, and Matt’s knee is fucking killing him. 

John takes one look at Matt and heads for the bathroom. Matt can hear the rattle of the pill bottle, and when John reappears he’s got a pain pill in the palm of his hand. He gives it to Matt and hands him a glass of water. John ruffles Matt’s hair while he drinks the water, and it’s so brief and so unexpected that Matt almost wonders if he imagined it. But no: the sense memory of John’s warm, firm palm, of his fingers brushing across Matt’s forehead—it’s too specific. It definitely happened. Matt decides not to think about it, which means of course that it’s all he can think about. 

They eat at the table—John clears several weeks’ worth of mail and takeout menus off of it and sets two places with real plates and silverware. 

Why would John touch Matt’s hair? Matt spins the question around and around and around in his head while he shovels lasagna into his face. It was an affectionate gesture. Okay. But, like, fatherly affection? Comradely affection? Sexy affection?

_Sexy affection?_ Jesus. Matt hates himself for even considering the possibility and hates himself more for having combined the words “sexy” and “affection” because now his brain is just chanting “sexy affection” at him over and over and over like the world’s most obnoxious Greek chorus. 

Finally the hydromorphone kicks in. The throb of his knee recedes into the background, and Matt goes nicely mellow. He manages to get through the rest of dinner without embarrassing himself. Or rather, nearly manages. 

“That was delicious,” John says, clearing the plates. 

“Thanks, you too,” Matt says nonsensically, and John laughs, sharp and genuine. “Why, thank you, Matt,” he says, smirking.

“Fuck my life,” Matt says sincerely, and hobbles back to the couch. Maybe he can smother himself to death in the couch cushions. He flops down face-first, but just lying down turns out to feel so good that he decides life might be worth living after all. 

“Relax,” John says from the kitchen, where he’s bustling around cleaning up. “I’m not going to have some kind of big freakout on you.”

“Cool,” Matt says into the couch, relieved. John isn’t going to have some kind of big freakout. But:

“Wait,” Matt’s head snaps up. “About what?”

“You know,” John says, running their plates under the tap before loading them into his tiny, half-broken dishwasher. “About you having sex with men.” 

Matt falls off the couch. 

 

* * *

 

Through some miracle, Matt’s knee doesn’t even give a twinge when he hits the ground. But his face does, because he lands on it. 

“Lucy told me,” John says, holding an ice pack against Matt’s cheekbone. “I guess she saw you on some dating app or something, and she knows you’re staying with me.”

Matt groans. Fucking Lucy. 

“I think she was worried you might have designs on my virtue,” John said. 

“Ha ha,” Matt says, and even he can tell it’s unconvincing. “That’s so funny. Lucy. She’s funny. What a funny daughter you have.” 

John _hmm_ s thoughtfully. “You know, Matt,” he says, “we’ve already established that I’m not terrible at feelings.”

Matt shuts his eyes against the kindness on John’s face. “Yeah, but I am,” he says. “I suck at feelings.” 

“Okay,” John says gently, “well, here’s a tip: it helps to talk about them.” 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Matt says. 

“Just give it a try,” John says. 

“But—”

“Come on.”

“I want to kiss you,” Matt blurts out. _I guess that counts_ , he thinks wildly, and waits for—he doesn’t know what. For John to recoil. For John to laugh. For John to tell him to get out of his apartment. For John to pity him. But: 

“Do it,” John says. 

“What?” Matt says blankly. 

“You have my permission. What are they calling it these days—my consent.” 

“Did your therapist—” Matt starts faintly.

“Nah,” John says. “Mandatory workplace sexual harassment training.”

“Oh,” Matt says. He isn’t getting any less confused.

“You know,” John says. “Where they train you to sexually harass your co-workers.”

“Okay,” Matt says. 

“That was a joke,” John says. 

“Oh,” Matt says. 

“You know, you don’t _have_ to kiss—“ John starts, and Matt finally gets with the picture. 

John’s mouth is warm and soft, and he smells so fucking good. It’s a long, slow, sweet kiss, and when they break for air, John curls his hand possessively around the nape of Matt’s neck and keeps him braced there, their foreheads pressed together. The dishwasher hums in the background and for once, Matt’s knee doesn’t even hurt. 

“I have another feeling,” Matt says.

“Huh?” John says intelligently. His eyelids are at half-mast and he looks about as addled as Matt feels. 

“Another feeling I should talk about,” Matt elaborates.

“Um, okay,” John says, pulling back a little. 

“Because the first feeling turned out so well,” Matt adds. 

John finally picks up what he’s throwing down. “Does this feeling have to do with bed?” he asks.

Matt nods seriously. “It’s a very powerful feeling.” 

John kisses him again, and then again. Soft and sweet. “It’s important—” _kiss_ “—to be in touch—” _kiss_ “—with your feelings.” 

Matt smiles into the kisses. “John McClane,” he murmurs against John’s mouth.

“Yeah?” John says, his mouth drifting sideways and down, tracing the line of Matt’s jaw.

“I have feelings for you.”

**Author's Note:**

> And then they have feelings all over each other, and probably get married at some point, right? RIGHT.


End file.
